Many Christians, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, constitutionalists, patriotic independents and other traditionalists are grappling mightily with how to vote in the upcoming election.

Some regard George W. Bush and John F. Kerry as equally unacceptable choices. They see the two major political parties as so close – “not a dime’s worth of difference” as George Wallace used to say – as to make a third-party choice the only valid one. After all, they say, “Voting for the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”

Others plead that the “lesser of two evils” is also by definition the greater good, and that no matter what the mistakes and imperfections of George W. Bush and his administration, it’s light years better than the wholesale betrayal America would experience during a Kerry administration.

But many conscience-driven, traditionally minded Americans are conflicted over this choice. They’re fearful that the Republican Party in its current state is incapable of restoring America to its long-abandoned constitutional framework, but also worried that voting for a third-party candidate more to their liking would hand the presidency, and America’s future, over to Kerry. Let’s take a closer look.

War

Right now, the world’s only superpower is engaged in not one, but two wars – each of them to the death – though most Americans appear oblivious to both.

One is a war against an external enemy, while the other rages within our own borders and among our own people.

The outside war is with radical Islam. Yes, it’s a clash of civilizations. Yes, the militant strain of Islam metastasizing around the world today is an evil, murderous, mind-control cult – the successor to communism as the latest totalitarian movement bent on world domination. And yes, this isn’t a result of the Iraq war. Remember, demon-possessed jihadists gleefully flew jumbo jets full of innocent people into large buildings filled with many more innocent people, dooming thousands to a fiery death, long before we invaded Iraq.

In any event, the dream that we can just go home, get out of the Middle East, is a fantasy. We were attacked on our own soil. We have no choice but to take the battle to the enemy. We must be strong and resolute – from now on, and forever after. One al-Qaida leader said recently that they must kill 4 million Americans “as a prerequisite to any Islamic victory.”

OK, what’s the second war? America’s new civil war, ultimately even more dangerous than the war on terror, is a death-struggle over the very soul and identity of the country. On one side of the battlefield are arrayed those who hold sacred everything upon which America’s greatness and prosperity were founded. On the other side are those who reject thousands of years of proven Judeo-Christian principles. They seek to expunge every vestige of God from American law and culture, while laboring to re-define man, marriage and morality to reflect their own selfish fantasies and addictions, their desire for power, and their alien worldview.

Think I’m exaggerating?

Tiny case in point: Do you remember, immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, when our nation was wracked in profound shock and grief, when tears and heartache and memorials bloomed on every corner? Well, Breen Elementary School in Rocklin, Calif., joined in, displaying on its marquee a simple, heart-felt message of comfort – “God Bless America” – in honor of the 3,000 Americans consumed in the jihadists’ orgy of destruction.

The American Civil Liberty Union’s response? It threatened legal action, demanding that the sign “must be replaced immediately,” calling it a “clear violation of the California and United States constitutions, as well as the California Education Code.”

That’s one example. You know and I know this column could be filled to overflowing with similar examples of people and organizations operating under the banner of American freedom, doing their utmost to destroy that very freedom.

No doubt about it, America is plagued by an “enemy within” as well as the jihadist “enemy without.”

So, what kind of people do we have in America these days to fight these wars?

About half of the country’s voters are so profoundly confused and/or corrupted that they voted for Bill Clinton, voted for Al Gore, and will vote for John Kerry – all three of whom are pathological liars.

Thanks to the powerful Matrix-like conditioning of the modern media culture in which we all grow up – it’s the “water” we “fish” swim in – tens of millions of Americans are living in a trance state of some sort. That is, they see evil and think it’s good; they see good and think it’s evil.

They listen to a good leader and cynically conclude he’s either stupid, insincere or dangerous. This, by the way, is precisely how the establishment press regarded Ronald Reagan while he was president.

On the other hand, these types hear a politician or minister who is obviously insincere, smarmy and illogical, and to him they give their allegiance. You see, such a “leader” is just like they are on the inside. The clueless followers live in denial, they are “enemies” of their own conscience, and such a clueless “leader” supports their unconscious rebellion against reality. Any truly honest and righteous leader, on the other hand, makes them uncomfortable, as he represents on the outside the conscience they are escaping from on the inside.

And so, the forces of corruption in America – in both leadership and constituency – are very powerful today. In fact, they dominate the cultural and policy landscape.

Chief among the “hypnotists” of our culture is the press, the filter through which most people experience world events, as well as the entertainment media, through which they experience culture. Both of these – with occasional exceptions on the news side in the Internet, talk radio and some cable TV, and on the entertainment side with figures like Mel Gibson – are profoundly at odds with everything America stands for.

Therefore, our very sense of reality is skewed. We live in a virtual-reality Matrix created by our “communications” media, which don’t actually communicate reality accurately, but rather re-create their own reality, apart from the real one. If issues like abortion and the “gay-rights” agenda were reported accurately, fully and courageously, those issues would long ago have been history – just like slavery.

The entertainment media? Between the government school system and Hollywood, millions of America’s youths have been shaped into pathetic shadows of the noble, beautiful young men and women they were meant to be.

Thus, the news and entertainment media are the primary corrupters of American civilization, and the hottest spots in Hell are, in my humblest opinion, reserved for them.

How can America survive all this? And what will it take to bring America back?

Many thought 9-11 had done the trick. There was a temporary resurgence of patriotism and love of country. But then, even the worst scoundrels can be united by a common enemy. It didn’t last – America doesn’t even know it’s at war anymore. Many have become so corrupted that they’re permanently on the wrong side.

Fighting back

While the great “unwashed masses” float along, caught up with their sports, entertainment, sex, drugs, Internet pornography and many other distractions, there are forces on the good side fighting for the restoration of America’s soul.

The entire homeschooling movement is raising a generation that remembers America’s historical and spiritual roots. Traditionally oriented religious, cultural and policy organizations are championing the Judeo-Christian values that literally form the substance of Western Civilization. Public-interest law firms fight the good fight against the nation’s activist judges and anti-God interest groups. Pro-life individuals and organizations open their homes to unwed mothers needing a place to go. Millions of adults and youths in the Boy Scouts of America pursue the high ideals of yesteryear’s national greatness.

Want to know how America’s cultural war will really be won? I’ll give you my answer right now: If, guided by the Living God of wisdom, you fight for what is right, no matter what – you’ll win your soul and those of your family. And if everyone and everything else goes to Hell and the battle is lost, you still will have won. But if enough of these battles are fought valiantly, the country as a whole will be transformed – just as it has been transformed by evil not all at once, but little by little by little.

You can have the real America in your home. You can post the Ten Commandments. You can pray in your home school. You can pledge allegiance “Under God.” That’s where it all started, in the “home churches” of England, whose members later traveled to Holland and ultimately to “the new world” – America – for freedom. And that is how freedom will be reborn.

Freedom is not, as most today believe, the liberty to do anything you want, no matter how immoral or destructive. True freedom is the privilege of being obedient to God, so you can be saved from the tyranny of Hell. (“Those who will not be governed by God, will be ruled by tyrants,” said William Penn.) Man is by his very nature obedient – either to Heaven or Hell. And so the “freedom” being worshiped today – even the freedom enshrined by Libertarians – is a lie. You can never worship liberty instead of God and remain free.

Thus, freedom is not a top-down thing. Your president can’t give it to you. You have to recognize the divine paradox that freedom means obedience (to God), while today’s re-defined “freedom” to go to Hell any way you like, is also obedience – to the unseen forces of darkness. In other words, slavery.

“OK, that’s all fine,” you say, “but what about the president and the election? How come it’s taking so long to get to that?”

Hang on, I’m getting there.

We first need to realize fully that millions of Americans are incapable of discerning truth from falsehood. They watch Bill Clinton talk and are hypnotized by his charm and charisma, and they like him – and forget everything he did for eight years to destroy their country.

Did you know that, for the last generation, virtually all marketing and advertising have been based on stimulating feelings and emotions, rather than appealing to reason and logic? We’ve been conditioned to respond primarily emotionally to everything. Thus, Bill Clinton could wreak havoc on America for eight years, destroy our intelligence apparatus, undermine the FBI’s mission, give secret weapons technology to Communist China in return for campaign cash, set the stage for 9-11, then loot the White House on the way out the door – and still be loved by millions of Americans. Hillary could still be elected to represent in the United States Senate a state she’s not even from. Bill could emerge as an absurdly popular – nay, worshipped – ex-president.

Like Clinton, John Kerry is a sociopath – that is, instead of his words and deeds orbiting around conscience, which in turn revolves around God, they revolve instead around personal ambition. Kerry is a liar, pure and simple. He says whatever he and his advisers calculate will make the largest number of people in any particular audience like him and want to vote for him. His past is full of flagrant contractions and flip-flops on crucial issues. But all this means nothing to many Americans.

You see, the past makes no difference – lies, contradictions, treachery, even criminality. Too many Americans have no memory for these things. All that counts is the way they connect emotionally to what they are exposed to in the present – it’s all about how someone can make you feel. Thus does a charismatic liar win many hearts.

Compromised Republicans

The Democrat Party is the party of throwing away thousands of years of Western Civilization, of throwing away the Ten Commandments, of throwing away traditional morality. It is the party of man being his own God.

So what about the Republican Party?

Well, if you go by their platform, there is a dramatic difference between the Republican and Democrat parties. But using the more reality-based standard – not of what people say, but of what they do – it becomes immediately evident that the Republicans also have been profoundly compromised. If the Democrat Party is totally possessed by evil, then you might say the Republican Party is half possessed by evil, and half still good.

But before we divorce ourselves from the Republicans, take a moment to realize that your own churches – yes, I’m talking about the big, mainstream Protestant denominations, as well as the Catholic Church – have also become just as “half possessed by evil” as the Republican Party. If that statement shocks you – good, it’s about time you woke up. Episcopal ordination of homosexual priests, the archbishop of Canterbury (head of the Anglican Church) praising a new Bible that encourages fornication and homosexuality, the Presbyterian Church USA divesting from Israel as though it were a terrorist pariah state, the clergy sex scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church to the highest levels – these are in many ways more grotesque and profane desecrations of founding principles than those of today’s Republican Party.

If you disavow the Republican Party, just make sure you’re holding your church to the same standard.

Moving on. Very simply, while you’re fighting the real fight for America – the bottom-up fight I talked about – in your family, in your child’s education, with your cultural choices, with what you support and don’t support – at the same time, do the sensible thing at election time. Although the real America can be restored only from the ground up, when it comes to electing representatives to public office, it doesn’t make sense to vote for someone who’s not in the race.

The race is not between those whose names appear on the ballot, but rather is between those who actually have any chance of winning. Nobody reading these words can reasonably believe that anybody other than George W. Bush or John F. Kerry will be president next January. And we, you and me, have the power to decide which of these two will be the “father of our country” for the next four years.

Father of our country?

A lot could be said about how Kerry would dramatically accelerate America’s loss of national sovereignty in favor of global governance, how he would stack the federal and supreme courts with liberal activist judges, consolidate homosexual marriage into the mainstream, further entrench abortion on demand, betray America’s military and much more bad stuff. Without doubt, as president, Kerry would advance the cause of evil and ultimately multiply the suffering and death of innocents.

But beyond his role as chief executive and commander in chief, the president is also, in effect, the father of our country while he is in office. This is more of a spiritual role. The father of a family, including our national family, is like the sun in the sky. It quietly radiates 24×7, and invisibly, imperceptibly, shapes life on this planet. The outpouring of love for Ronald Reagan the nation experienced during his funeral week was a testimony to the powerful role every president of the United States has as a sort of father, a role entrusted to him for a period of time.

As Rev. Jesse Peterson, founder of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, put it: “Ronald Wilson Reagan was America’s dad. America and the world owe a debt of gratitude to this man.” Reagan’s outlook, his disposition, his faith – they affected America just as much as his policy initiatives and political leadership.

Bill Clinton was a bad dad. He led a generation of 12-, 13-, 14-year-old young people into an obsession with sexual experimentation. “If it was good enough for the president of the United States and Monica Lewinsky, it’s good enough for me” was a message that resonated powerfully in the vulnerable souls of millions of America’s precious youths. He corrupted a generation. But not through any executive order he issued or legislation he championed, just through being what he was and doing what he did – as president.

Even though I prefer the platform – just words, ultimately, as all platforms are – of the Constitution Party, I’m supporting George W. Bush for president because I believe that by re-electing him America is more likely to be free in 2008 and 2012 – or at least free enough for there still to be a fighting chance to restore America to a moral, constitutional, Judeo-Christian framework. Otherwise, by the time the Libertarian or Constitution or other party is strong enough to win in four, eight or 12 years – if they ever are – there will be nothing left of our country. It will be too late.

Chuck Colson, once at the right hand of the highest power in the land – and who later, while serving his Watergate prison sentence, discovered One much more powerful, and has served Him ever since – had this to say recently on the subject of voting for the “lesser of two evils”:

So why don’t Christians vote? Father Frank Pavone, co-founder of Priests for Life, answers that some religious leaders are telling people not to vote! He explains, “Some Christians feel it is more righteous not to vote when the slate of candidates isn’t that great. They feel compromised, dirty, or even sinful by casting a ballot for someone with whom they disagree.”

Pavone continues, “When you are faced with two candidates, neither of whom is perfect … but one of whom is clearly closer in his or her convictions to the Gospel than any other, it is perfectly legitimate to vote for the better one.” Government is God’s ordained instrument for restraining evil and sin. If one would do a better job, we’re bound to vote for that person.

But isn’t that a vote for “the lesser of two evils”? No. Pavone replies, “One is choosing a good – [that is] the reduction … of an existing evil.” What some would call a vote for “the lesser of two evils” is really a vote to lessen evil.

One of the most clear-cut examples is abortion. In numerous races, one candidate wants to maintain unrestricted access to abortion while the other is pro-abortion, but wants some restrictions. I prefer, of course, a pro-lifer with no reservations. But a vote for the candidate advocating restrictions is a vote for less evil.

Yet if there is no candidate who promises to eliminate all abortions immediately – a position not likely to pass in Congress anyhow – some voters stay home on Election Day. The result? A candidate who could have moved the issue in the right direction loses by default, and the out-and-out pro-choicer wins – not good.

Father Pavone calls the vote “a practical exercise in leadership, by which we do our part to put people into office who can make some improvement in our country’s policies … [n]obody is morally bound to what is impossible, and it is perfectly legitimate to recognize the limits of what is possible.”

No candidate is perfect. Even if the vote in some states seems to be for the lesser of two evils, cast your vote to bring about less evil. Our concern should be to make our community and our nation more moral than it is. And we do that by electing candidates who, as God’s magistrates, reduce evil.

A vote that helps reduce evil may not be perfect, but it is a good vote.

Ultimately, how you vote will hinge on your reading of the character of two men.

Christians, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, constitutionalists, patriotic independents and other traditionalists: When you look at George W. Bush today and are dissatisfied – dissatisfied that he raised the federal budget sky-high, that he granted de facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, that he doesn’t always follow the Constitution, that he invaded Iraq, that he hasn’t done enough to fight abortion and gay rights, that whatever …

What conclusion do you draw?

One conclusion is that Bush is a globalist, money-grubbing elitist Bonesman conspirator, or at best a clueless, sold-out puppet.

Another interpretation at the opposite end is that Bush is a general at war – a general who knows more than you do, who sees the lay of the land, who comprehends the odds, who knows what troops he’s got, and determines which battles he can and must win and which ones he has to concede, at least temporarily – even if it looks bad to his supporters.

And where does the truth lie? What is the belief that will guide your vote on Election Day?

For me, despite whatever real or perceived flaws he has, I will vote for George W. Bush, a man who believes in freedom, stands for decent principles, has guts, trusts in God – the real one – and prays to that God. I’ll vote for Bush over another Bill Clinton, another unprincipled opportunist for whom nothing is sacred other than himself and his personal glory, who would betray America as easily as breathing.

Yes, Kerry would betray the unborn, betray our youth, betray both the haves and the have-nots, betray us all. With inspiring rhetoric and fanfare, he would unravel what remains of our national sovereignty, leading us down the road to servitude, poverty and insecurity in a thousand smothering ways – all the while piously thinking he was ushering in a new era of peace.